Campfirer.com - A Jabber to Campfirenow.com Gateway

Campfire is a web-based group chat service that is directed at businesses. Rather than using a standard protocol, the folk at 37 Signals decided to invent their own. This has led to the necessary creation of a number of custom clients to interact with the API using their unique, one-of-a-kind protocol (for those who don’t want to have to chat in a browser window).

I heart Jabber (XMPP). There’s a good reason Google and Facebook chose that protocol to power their chat. I have no idea why 37 Signals didn’t use Jabber too. Maybe they’re mavericks.

Naturally, I’d like to be able to use one of many Jabber clients to access Campfire, along with all of my other Jabber based accounts. To do this, I wrote a Jabber Component. It provides Multi-User Chat (MUC) support for Jabber servers that utilizes Campfire’s API, so you can “join” a room, “talk”, and see other posts by other users. It’s called Campfirer (campfire + jabber = campfirer).

I’ve set up a running instance of the service at campfirer.com. A description of how to download / set up the code for your own Jabber server can be found there.

The code and more info can be found on the github project page. Pull requests welcome.